Beet and kale salad

Tonight I wanted to make something nutritious, colorful and tasty, hence this beet and kale salad. By themselves, beets provide a full array of red, pink and purple depending on what you look at: the vegetable, the water it cooks in, the white cutting board which is no longer white, or your hands after preparing them. At any rate, beets represent some of the most wonderful ingredients and are packed with nutrients. Some of these include folate, manganese, copper, fiber, potassium, phoshorus, betalains (which give them their color) and other antioxidants. One thing that is often mentioned is that you should not overcook beets, at the risk of losing many of these antioxidants. At the same time, eating them raw is not recommended either as they are hard, crunchy, hard to digest and as a root vegetable, meant to be cooked.

You can make a beet salad with just this one main ingredient and a dressing. Since we also had fresh kale, I thought that the green color from kale would make a nice combination with red tones, and the flavors would complement one another. So I cut a few stems of kale and lightly cooked them to make them less hard and crunchy – just like beet. Lettuce is by nature soft, but I find that kale tastes much better when lightly steamed or cooked. Timing is everything: not too little time, not too long.

Once this was done, the rest was easy, since my classic French lemon and olive oil dressing adds itself to most salads. This one was no exception. You can make the dressing without mustard if you’d like, to emphasize the freshly squeezed lemon and olive oil with these two vegetables.

The salad was a dinner, which would have been fine on its own. We were a tad hungrier, so I paired it with a simple black bean and red onion combo in the pan (with a bit of avocado oil, salt and cumin). This made our vegan meal.

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About Nico

Nicolas Pujol is a life enthusiast, technology executive and essayist. His personal website connects fitness, nutrition, recipes, philosophy and travel. He blogs about technology at Firstpractica.com, and about lifestyle at Laylita.com.